The Lullus Fire of Bad Hersfeld

Lullus was no Hessian. He was born about 710 in Wessex, in the south of England, and entered the Benedictine monastery of Malmesbury while still young. In 737 he travelled to Rome, and there his path crossed that of Boniface, the Anglo-Saxon bishop who was building churches and monasteries on the continent. Lullus stayed with him. He became his messenger, his archdeacon and at last his writing hand, when the old man’s eyes began to fail. For fifteen years he journeyed with him through Thuringia, Franconia and Hessen.

In 754 Boniface laid down his office and named Lullus his successor; in that same year the old man was struck down in Frisia. So the Englishman came to the bishop’s seat of Mainz. On the river Fulda, where the monk Sturmius had set up a hermitage as early as 736, Lullus saw his chance. From 769 he had a Benedictine abbey raised there, with stone walls, a scriptorium and a school. In 775 Charlemagne took the monastery under his royal protection, and around the abbey walls grew the village that would later be called Hersfeld. In 781 Pope Hadrian I sent him the pallium: now Lullus was truly an archbishop. Yet he returned again and again to his abbey on the Fulda, and there he wished to be buried.

On 16 October 786 Lullus died in his own monastery, eighty years old, so they say, and was laid to rest in the abbey church. The monks guarded his grave, and the farmers of the district learned the road to it. When in the year 852 his bones were solemnly raised and set upon the altar — the translation which the people have called his canonisation ever since — so great a crowd came to Hersfeld that the abbot resolved to repeat it every year, in the week of his death day.

Thus a church commemoration became a fair. Whoever came for the saint also brought his wool, his cattle and his pots. A charter of 16 November 1326 records feast and market in black and white for the first time. The pilgrims came from far off, slept outside the walls and made fires to warm themselves and cook their soup; out of those fires, it is said, grew the one great Lullus fire that appears in the sources from the end of the sixteenth century. It is no sacrificial fire and no pagan survival, however gladly that tale is told. It is the fire of the guests of Saint Lullus, and it never went out again.

The abbey grew into one of the mightiest in the empire. After the fire of 1038 the church was rebuilt as an immense Romanesque basilica, a good hundred metres long, with a transept of fifty-five metres; in the bell tower beside it they hung the Lullus bell, cast in that same year 1038 and to this day the oldest dated bell in Germany. For centuries that nave stood under its roof, until in 1761, in the middle of the Seven Years War, French troops under Marshal de Broglie used the church as a supply store. On withdrawing they set the stores alight so that the enemy should not have them. The church burned out. The roof was never laid again.

What remains is walls without a ceiling, up on the hill, with the sky for a vault: the largest Romanesque church ruin in Europe. Since 1951 the Bad Hersfelder Festspiele have played there every summer, and the audience sits among the piers where the monks once sang. But in October the town belongs to Lullus again. Then the wood is stacked, then the bell strikes twelve, then the fire is lit and burns six days and six nights through to the Sunday evening. There is no other folk festival in Germany that calls its founder by name for so long. The abbey is a ruin, the archbishop is dust — but the fire is still there.